Sunday, March 11, 2012

The photographs which were included in Paris Petridis’ exhibition entitled “The Void and the Country”, were realised over four monthly visits to Egypt between February 2009 and March 2011. These series of photos started out as a documentation of the Greek diaspora.

The vacancy in the pictures is a visual metaphor for this abandonment: a country devoid of its people.

Tourists are insensitive, Canetti once wrote. Right, but travelers?

Intimate Coasters / Fani Sofologi

Fani Sofologi presented a series of drawings on paper, which has emerged from a creative process of solitary performances in the studio without spectators. At a first stage, Sofologi through a process of mental introspection, introduces her liberated feelings on the paper with no inhibitions, conscious control or filtering of the gesture. At this stage, she uses her bodily fluids as witnesses – bearers of the mental state she is in. By using blood and tears as raw material as well as by the ripping, rubbing and crumpling of the paper, she translates these feelings into an aggressive and at the same time mentally discharging energy.

The disastrous attack on the paper surface is followed by a second stage; that of the restoration and caring cover-up of the violent action with the controlled gesture of drawing and adding colour. The artist proceeds at this phase to the restoration of the work, by masking through drawing the “wounds” and by decorating the works using glitter and intense, happy colours.